Sara Chong, Illustrator, Painter, Storyboards Artist

Painting for Polygon Pictures, for the World of Warcraft trading card game

And so here’s update number 2 of going-on’s… in February this year, Stick and Balloon went to Tokyo because Jimmyfish was awarded a Jury Mention. Among the many exciting things that we did in Tokyo, we paid Polygon Pictures a visit, and that somehow ended up in a painting job. I’ll be honest and say that this was both incredibly exciting and scary for me, because up till February, I’d only ever done a grand total of 6 proper digital paintings in that…painty paint style. Before I got this job I was doing some small painting work for Open Emotion studios, but I can’t say anything else about that project. My point being – I’m still very new to this whole painting thing, and I kick myself every time for not making more time to paint. But here’s to the beginning of my adventure into digital painting and painty paint-ness.

The painting job turned out to be for the World of Warcraft trading card game, and of course, I had to do some tests first. Once again, I’d found myself standing in that mental plain white box of a room with my tools, and a giant wall-sized sign saying “LEVEL UP OR DIE.” Don’t you just love being in situations like that! It’s what I live for. THE ROOM.

So here’s the test:

Young Malfurion

I’ve got a long way to go with painting, definitely. But I learned a lot from working on this one.

And then came the actual cards. I was only allowed to paint Item cards, which aren’t as exciting as doing character cards, but there’s also a lot to be learnt from doing simple cards… and yes, I needed the practice.

The trickiest bit was the magic bits, and I have to admit that I still don’t like the magic on the bow. It looks so messy, argh. Learning and experimenting’s the way to go… anyway, after these 3, I was allowed to paint one character (yay!) and it was an orc lady. Forgive my World of Warcraft ignorance – I haven’t had time to play any of it. My last experience with Warcraft was Warcraft II, back in the day of “Stop poking me!” and 2D orcs and elves. But after working on these – my god, I just craved playing games (especially warcraft) for weeks. So much that I had game soundtracks playing while I worked to trick my brain into thinking that it was playing a game. Which it was, actually. Working on any sort of illustration or design is like playing a puzzle game, one of those ..Monkey Island types where you make weird connections between things that don’t seem to make sense. Ooh, I’ve started rambling. Here’s the orc lady.

She looks quite manly, no?

That’s it for this update. Next update will be ….. Tembusu Bemused: The Tree Chapter! (Part One) that update should be fun, because you’ll get to have a go at playing the game 😀